Marie Therese Landry Was a Schoolgirl

I suppose my title isn’t really very informative.  Most of my recent ancestors have attended school, so the same thing could be said of them.  I thought about putting the word “Here” at the end of the title, but I decided against it.  You may not be here, and you may not know where my here is.  So, just to make sure that you do know, I am here in Baton Rouge.  And, yes, my great grandmother Marie Therese Landry was a schoolgirl here.

I’ve known that she came to school in Baton Rouge for a while.  Two years ago I wrote a post titled “Death of a Noble Woman.”  I shared her death notice and the obituary that was written up in the newspaper.  The title of the post came from the newspaper article.  But in that article, it talked about Marie Therese having attended St. Joseph’s Academy of Baton Rouge.  I remember thinking it was interesting that she went to school here.  I’m familiar with the present location of the Academy and wondered if she had gone there.  I was curious to know if the students at that time would live on the campus.  

I thought maybe I’d go by the school and see if they had any records from back then.  But I didn’t.  I have no excuse.  It’s not that far from here.  But come to find out, the old location of the school is even closer to where I live.  I could walk there from here.  In fact, I have been walking there every day when I go to work for the past six years!

I work at GIS, an engineering firm that is presently located in II Rivermark Centre.  When I first started working there, it was the north tower of the Chase buildings.  But the buildings changed ownership and the names changed.  For the past year or two, I Rivermark Centre has been undergoing renovations.  I’ve had to change my path to work a few times to find the safest and most manageable way to the building I work in.  I’ve seen all the progress along the way.  They’ve done a nice job.

When they had a grand opening the other day, we thought we’d go.  So we walked there and stood around waiting for the ceremonies to begin.  As I stood there, I read a plaque that was on the wall of the lobby.  And look what it said!  The location of the building was the original location of St. Joseph’s Academy from 1869 to 1941.  The plaque was to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the opening of the school.  So the school opened around October 22, 1868.  And now it has been 155 years since that date.

And how does that date compare to the life of my great grandmother?  Well, Marie Therese Landry was the first child of Trasimond Landry and Marie Amelie “Belite” Bujol.  She was born on September 25, 1868.  The school was started less than a month after she was born.  The family lived in Brusly, Louisiana, which is just across the river from Baton Rouge.  I still don’t know when she started attending school there or whether she boarded there.

But just a few weeks ago, my post was about her father Trasimond’s death.  He died in 1879 when Marie Therese was just eleven years old.  According to family history, this left the family destitute.  How did they afford to send her to a private school in Baton Rouge?  Her Landry grandfather Narcisse Landry had died in 1876.  He had been living with the family because he had lost everything after the Civil War.  Marie Carmelite Hebert Landry (his wife) had died before the Civil War.  Belite’s father Joseph Hubert Amedee Bujol had died before that, so Anna Adele Landry Bujol (his wife) was a widow for over 40 years.  But she was a planter with a Leveque cousin, so maybe she had some money to help the family out.

 After Trasimond died, Belite remarried not much later.  She was married to Pierre Magloire Babin within the year.  They show up on the 1880 Census in Brusly with all five of her Landry children and a new little Babin daughter.  The daughter was only three days old, and they hadn’t even named her yet.  I don’t know how long she lived, because there is no further record of her.  Also living in the household was Belite’s mother Adele.  It shows for Marie Therese that she was “at school.”  I think this just means she was attending school.  It doesn’t specifically state that she was going away for school.

Maybe she didn’t start going to the Academy until after her father’s death.  There are still a lot of unanswered questions.  Maybe this plaque will give me the motivation to look into it a bit more.  I’m glad I found out about this location for the school at this time.  I can still enjoy knowing that I’m walking the paths that my great grandmother did.  Our work is relocating, so I won’t be walking to work beginning next year.  But I’ll still be able to walk by from time to time and think about my great grandmother when she was just a schoolgirl.